Concluding Thoughts

Abstract

Sport. Politics. Neoliberalism. A veritable iron triangle of modern American life—awash with racism, sexism, class bias, greed, exploitation, oppression, imperialism, ideological warfare, monumental successes, and equally epic failures. As we have argued in this book, the racetrack is more than a sporting metaphor for the rotational counterbalance of welfare state economics and laissez-faire market economies—a back-and-forth history of economic stimulation and perpetual stagnation overlapped by state spending and private enterprise. In the 1970s, oil oligarchs, political and military elites, and global capitalists mobilized against the welfare state, positioning a free market catholicon of endless individual prosperity: thus setting the stage for the ascent of already-aligned corporate sport. And NASCAR, more so than any other U.S. sporting enterprise, was able to grow—and help facilitate growth—in tandem with this neoliberal political and cultural economy.

[W]hat did this policy of society, this Gesellschaftspolitik, have to consist in for it to succeed in constituting a market space in which competitive mechanisms could really function despite their intrinsic fragility?

—Michel Foucault (2008, p. 240)